• Question: How would your work be used in a practical situation?

    Asked by Sabah to Abbie, Melanie, Paul, Stu, Tom on 7 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Abbie Hutty

      Abbie Hutty answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      My job is pretty specific – designing the rover to survive the launch, and lading onto Mars, and then operating on the Martian surface. Technology from the rover could be use in all sorts of other situations though – our autonomous navigation could be used for robots in disaster zones or bomb disposal, for example.

    • Photo: Stuart Inglis

      Stuart Inglis answered on 7 Mar 2016:

      Hey Sabah,

      Almost all of my work is done in a practical situation, generally we get a problem like a leaking pipe or something needing changed 3000m under the sea and we’ve got to come up with a way for the underwater robots to do it. There’s lots of practical challenges which we need to overcome to do this.

      If you’re up for a challenge and want to experience the practical side of being an underwater robot pilot try covering one of your eyes and throwing a ball of paper into a bin. Tricky? What’s happened there is you’ve lost your depth perception as this requires too eyes. You get this same effect when flying an underwater robot with only one camera so our pilots often don’t know how far away things are!

    • Photo: Paul Webb

      Paul Webb answered on 8 Mar 2016:

      I make machines run if it’s broken I can weld it, if there’s no power I can test it, if it wort turn I can replace the bearings

      I suppose I’m least focused part of engineering in here but my skills means I’m the one to have in a zombie apocalypse lol

    • Photo: Melanie Zimmer

      Melanie Zimmer answered on 18 Mar 2016:

      My research and work would be used in (as of now) manufacturing, more precisely in the production. On a production line we have different robots drilling, gluing, assembling, etc. The idea is that we could take a robot out and put another one in. The system would be able to recognise this change and act upon it. We also want to take it a step further and see how the system can be optimised in its energy consumption. For this, the robots need to communicate. And this is where software and my work come in.

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